America Aflame (25 page)

A few addenda to the case: John Sandford, the executor of Dr. Emerson's estate, died in an insane asylum shortly after the decision. Dr. Emerson's widow, the woman who refused to allow Dred Scott to purchase his freedom, moved to Massachusetts, married an anti-slavery congressman, and transferred ownership of Scott to the son of his original owner, who promptly manumitted both Scott and his wife on May 26, 1857. Dred Scott died one year later.

The northern reaction to the Dred Scott decision dashed President Buchanan's hopes for a smooth beginning to his administration. Things would get worse. Again, Old Buck had good intentions. In May, he dispatched his friend Mississippi senator Robert J. Walker to clean out the mess in Kansas and oversee a convention that would frame a constitution for congressional approval as a precursor to statehood. Walker, a Pennsylvanian by birth, seemed as if he would expire at the first gust of wind. Less than five and a half feet tall and weighing ninety-five pounds, he looked sickly when he was well, and deathly when he was not. A journey to the Kansas Territory was hardly what the doctor ordered, though he was probably anxious to get out of Washington, where he had managed to anger the sensitive southern coterie around the president by noting offhandedly that he did not expect Kansas to enter the Union as a slave state.

Walker oversaw two elections during his embattled six-month tenure. One was an election to the constitutional convention boycotted by free-staters who feared fraud, intimidation, and gerrymandering. Another was a vote for the territorial legislature in which, at Walker's urging, free-state residents participated. The latter election validated the free-staters' skepticism about the manner of conducting political contests in Kansas. The pro-slavery forces' recurrent creative math produced sleepy towns that had suddenly become bustling metropolises with voter rolls to match. Walker threw out the suspect ballots, allowing free-staters to claim a majority in the legislature. Predictably, the constitutional convention at Lecompton, elected by pro-slavery voters, framed a pro-slavery constitution and submitted the document to voters in a rigged election that Walker termed a “vile fraud, a base counterfeit.” Walker left Kansas for Washington in disgust to advise President Buchanan to throw out the Lecompton document. The legislature meanwhile, with its free-state majority, called for its own referendum, and voters overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton Constitution. The message from this political circus, and one that Walker shared with anyone who would listen, was that free-state voters formed a solid majority in Kansas. If the Democratic Party was serious about its support for popular sovereignty, then rejecting the Lecompton Constitution was the only conscionable option.
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Buchanan had strong personal and political ties with southern politicians dating from the Andrew Jackson administration. His interventions in the Scott case had shown that these ties overwhelmed sound judgment. Buchanan dismissed the advice of his own emissary and decided to push the Lecompton Constitution through the Congress, much to the delight of his southern friends and to the dismay of almost everyone else. The president's message to the House on Lecompton touched off a twelve-hour donnybrook in February 1858. Alexander Stephens, seeing tempers rise and civility fall, pressed for an adjournment to no avail. Sometime past midnight, South Carolina's Lawrence Keitt lunged at Pennsylvania's Republican congressman Galusha Grow after a purported insult, and the fight was on. While the Speaker's gavel vainly pounded for order, about fifty congressmen in various states of inebriation tangled with each other on the House floor. Representative James B. Clay of Kentucky, a Democrat, implored his colleagues, “Gentlemen, remember where you are!” which only incited the lawmakers even more. The rumble subsided only when Mississippi congressman William Barksdale tackled an unidentified assailant as the latter snatched his toupee and waved it about like a captured flag. Barksdale finally retrieved his own scalp and plopped it on his head wrong side out, the absurdity of the scene giving the combatants pause. Stephens, a waif of ninety-seven pounds, witnessed all this from a safe corner of the chamber. He despaired that “all things here are tending to bring my mind to the conclusion that this Government can not or will not last long.”
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Still, Stephens was not willing to give up on his beloved Union. Taking a page from his late and revered colleague Henry Clay, Stephens sought a compromise and enlisted two northerners, Republican William A. Howard of Michigan and William H. English of Indiana, a Democrat, in his cause. Stephens's efforts confronted a harsh reality: how does one compromise with fraud? This was the view not only of the Republicans but also of many northern Democrats, especially one of the most powerful and popular politicians, Stephen A. Douglas, who, in an unprecedented action, openly broke with the administration of his own party, a move that earned the permanent enmity of the president. He denounced the Lecompton document as a “flagrant violation of popular rights in Kansas” that he would “resist to the last.” Douglas cared less whether Kansas entered the Union as a free state or a slave state than whether the process of popular sovereignty ran its course. The Lecompton Constitution fell far short of satisfying that process. When President Buchanan warned Douglas to hew to the party line or face the kind of discipline Andrew Jackson applied to wayward Democrats, the Illinois senator shot back: “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.” And soon General Jackson's party would join its founder.
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Stephens had no more faith in Lecompton than Douglas, despite its pro-slavery orientation. He admitted that “we all [knew] that the Lecompton constitution was procured by fraud.” Yet Stephens was willing to forgo principle for the sake of salvaging a symbolic victory for the South, even though it was clear to the Georgian that Kansas would never become a slave state. Yet again, symbolism triumphed over reality. The Fugitive Slave Law would restore precious few slaves to their rightful owners; the Kansas-Nebraska Act would not create more slave states; and the Dred Scott decision would not secure the institution of slavery. These events did not substantively help the South in any way; but they did create a constituency of hostility far beyond the small minority of abolitionists who had raised up a lonely cant against the South for more than two decades before many more northerners joined the chorus. It was not the abolitionists, however, who grew the opposition. It was a perceived southern persistence at supporting measures that tortured the principles of fairness and democratic rule.
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By now, Stephens was thoroughly disillusioned with the political process and what it was doing to the country. He resolved to leave the Congress at the end of his term and return to Georgia to farm and practice law. But he wanted to resolve the Lecompton issue somehow. The result was a measure called the English Bill, a convoluted attempt to save face in a bad situation. The bill asked the voters of Kansas to determine whether they wanted statehood now with a modest federal land grant (considerably less than the Lecompton document requested), or statehood at some later time when the territory's population reached ninety thousand inhabitants. If voters supported the former proposition, they would ratify the Lecompton Constitution; if not, then presumably citizens would need to frame a new document at some unspecified future date. The English Bill was an ingenious measure that made no mention of slavery; its proponents called it a land grant bill and presented it to the voters as such, though scarcely a soul did not understand that the referendum would be an up or down vote on slavery. In the fair election that followed, Kansas voters decided to postpone statehood, thereby rendering the Lecompton Constitution moot. Kansas would enter the Union as a free state in 1861.

The crisis was over, but the damage was done. Coming on the heels of the Dred Scott decision, the Lecompton debacle further eroded northern faith in the federal government in its apparent vassalage to southern slaveholders. Southerners, confronted with a growing sentiment against them, even among moderate politicians and press, felt more estranged than ever from their fellow countrymen. The rapid ascendancy of the Republican Party, a purely sectional political organization, raised the specter of an administration hostile to southern interests at some not too distant point in time. The Democratic Party, with its strong southern base, no longer seemed the rock-solid upholder of those interests, as one of its most prominent leaders, Stephen A. Douglas, openly defied the president, a member of his own party, and took several other prominent northern Democrats into opposition with him.

Little wonder that the men in New York and other cities during the hard winter of 1857–58 filed into cold rooms or church pews to pray. The collapsing economy, the worsening sectional crisis, and the apparent escalation of social disorder created a sense of foreboding that drove these men to seek solace from God. In an increasingly evangelical nation, the suspicion that an epic struggle loomed took firmer root during these dark months, a sense that events were occurring that “may bring together the hosts of evil in one concentrated effort to crush the nation, whatever that nation be, which keepeth the truth.”
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Many of these men were newcomers to the city, a fast-paced, anonymous, even alien environment so different from the family-oriented, self-contained life of small towns and farms that provided the major stream of urban migration during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not so much a turn toward religion—these were already pious men for the most part—as an opportunity for personal rededication and spiritual fellowship at a time of growing strife. The urban economy and the principles of democracy and evangelical Protestantism had exalted the sovereignty of the individual: to work hard and achieve prosperity and independence, to support a political system that protected the rights of individuals, and to cultivate a personal relationship with God that would result in a spiritual rebirth and the absolution of sin. Walt Whitman sang about individual sovereignty in “Song of Myself,” a paean to the transcendent power of the individual to be anything and everything, even to aspire to God Himself.

Somewhere along the way to individual omnipotence, the progression halted. This came as no surprise to southern writers who had warned of the folly of unbridled individualism, how it defied both history and heaven. The lesson of the Garden of Eden—that man had limits—seemed lost on the go-getters of the North. The financial panic brought on by unchecked speculation was a consequence of unchecked impulse. The North had transformed from the God-centered society of the Puritans to the man-centered society of Wall Street. Northerners had lost respect for order and exchanged it for the belief that “the individual man was … of higher worth than any system of polity,” and had strayed from the Calvinist view that man's nature is flawed to a new belief in “attainable perfection.” Had reliance on self replaced reliance on God? Had sanctifying reason—that the intellect could solve any problem and overcome the forces of nature—created a false pride in human infallibility? Had pride caused Americans to assume they could transcend history itself?
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Southerners offered these critiques of northern urban society almost always within the context of the pro-slavery argument. Northerners mostly dismissed them as cynical propaganda. The connection between these southern indictments and the pro-slavery cause muffled similar critiques in the North, as most northerners smugly condemned human bondage in the South and ignored human misery outside their door. The reluctance to engage southern arguments on their own terms caused northerners to exaggerate the contented status of laborers in their midst, even during the Panic of 1857, and the freedoms of blacks and immigrants, despite the violence directed at them. Not all northerners were uncritical of their society. The Rev. Nathan Bangs of New York warned, “It is very danderous [
sic
] to exalt human reason so as to abuse revelation. Has it not a tendency to engender pride?” Historian Richard Hildreth cautioned against each individual appealing “to his own particular Reason, his own particular conscience, his own particular moral sentiment, as the ultimate tribunal.” Such an appeal invited anarchy. But in the context of contending civilizations—North and South—the northern press and political leaders continued to adopt an uncritical stance to the growing problems of a modern urban society.
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The religious revival of 1857–58, occurring at the confluence of despairing events and scenes, especially in the North, represented an important time of reflection, a drawing away from the headlong rush of progress. But it was very much part of the urban, commercial culture from which it sprang. The revival came with a significant boost from the urban penny press tired of the bad news of economic doldrums and political missteps. Here was a new story with an unusual twist as the minions of monetary greed suddenly rediscovered their faith. The newspapers called it “The Great Revival,” “the event of the century,” and “our American awakening.” More modest testimonials hailed the revival as the Third Great Awakening. It was none of these; but it was the first religious revival promoted by the secular press, prefiguring the media frenzy that would greet the mass revivals of Dwight L. Moody (a participant in the 1857–58 revival) in the postwar era. That the movement received its first and longest-lasting boost in New York City reflected the central role the metropolis now occupied in the nation's culture, economy, and communications. Although a national event, the revival centered primarily in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The South had escaped the brunt of the economic depression, and its need for such a middle-class expression of rededication was less.
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None of this is to diminish the significance of the event, especially for the businessmen involved. These were prayer meetings, with the emphasis on prayer. No sermons, typically, perhaps a hymn or two, but mostly reflections on God and the Bible and pledges to repent of sin. While the press generally treated these lunchtime retreats with generosity and approbation, they did not escape the scathing pen of James Gordon Bennett of the Democratic
New York Herald
. Bennett, and many other Democrats, loathed the do-goodism of evangelical Protestants, which they dismissed as little more than sectarian hypocrisy since most of their reform efforts seemed to center on getting immigrants out of taverns and off the voting rolls. The economic depression exacerbated these class and sectarian tensions, which Bennett, a consummate promoter like his rival Horace Greeley, exploited in the columns of his newspaper.